In Good Conscience
by Ukaisha
Summary: Kyle could not, in good conscience, leave anyone to freeze outside in the cold; not even an ignorant fatass who probably deserved it. (Takes place during "Jewpacabra"; no romance. ConCrit welcome.)


A/N: I have literally never written this much this fast. Please forgive any blatant errors; I literally drummed this out in about five hours and I'm about to go into a two week long field exercise, so I've got no time to make revisions.  
One of those "what happened when" scenarios.

You can choose to believe this is implied Kyman or not; up to you. It's not distinctive either way.

I can't help but notice that even though Eric is my second favorite character, I've yet to write a story actually concerning him rather than just mentioning him. Huh.

Thank you for reading; please ConCrit if you enjoyed it.

* * *

_In Good Conscience_

_"Admit you're lying, and I'll let you go."_

When Kyle had first made the decision to investigate the park, he hadn't known what to expect. Some trap set by Cartman, perhaps; maybe he had the town so riled up that they thought HE was the Jewpacabra.  
Maybe Cartman had dragged poor Butters into some elaborate plot to capture the mythical creature, and the "sacrifice" those weird grocery store guys had spoken of was going to wind up being Butters cowering below a tree somewhere, expecting that any second now he was about to die an agonizingly horrible death.  
The poor kid would believe anything, and surely Cartman was too cruel to let Butters in on the fact that he made the whole thing up.

Kyle didn't expect to find Cartman, alone, and especially not in the state he was in. As his gaze slowly scanned the park, his head on a swivel, his eyes just starting to find it a strain to see in the descending dusk, he had found a boy in a bunny costume.

At first, the sight was so unexpected and so bizarre that he had overlooked it, and he scanned right over the body hunched over and softly weeping in the distance. But then the visual suddenly clicked in his brain, and as soon as he did a double take, and the figure garbed in white shouted his name in the way that only a certain fatass could.

He hadn't been exactly sure up until that point what he had come to the park to do, whatever he had found. Had he found Cartman lying in wait with a trap or had he found Butters painfully left alone to die, he had just figured he would think of something or another that would disrupt his plans.

But this was just completely beyond reason.

Cartman was wearing a full-body bunny costume, stretched to capacity with the girth stuffed inside it.  
He had some dark reddish brown smear down the front of his face that Kyle couldn't identify.  
For some reason, he was chained to the ground. He could move about a few feet in either direction, but for the most part he was restrained to a single patch of grass.  
He was holding a basket.  
He was collecting eggs.  
At the cusp of darkness, with soft flakes of late spring snow just beginning to dance to the ground, Eric Cartman was collecting Goddamn Easter eggs in a bunny suit.

Right then and there, Kyle was done with it. He wanted nothing to do with whatever Cartman was involved with; no matter the plot, scheme, shenanigan, or otherwise. The exasperation as plain on his face as the flakes of snow on the green grass, he hardly heard the words that Cartman was throwing towards him, and Kyle didn't want to hear them.  
"Admit you're lying, and I'll let you go."  
Kyle had it in him to at least give him the chance. He had no doubt that Cartman would fail to respond to his offer, and predictably, he did not disappoint. After a short confession that was all too fake, he continued insisting that the Jewpacabra was out to get him.

Kyle walked away.

It took an enormous amount of restraint on his part to do this without saying a word in response, but he walked.  
He wondered where Butters was, and if Cartman would at least be kind enough to let him get home soon. He had a feeling the kid would get grounded otherwise.  
He wondered what exactly Cartman was achieving with whatever he was trying to pull. It didn't seem like a very effective scheme.  
Just as he walked out of range of Cartman's almost heart-wrenching cries, (which he was entirely immune to; being a friend of Cartman's for any period of time practically required you to be, or else you wound up like Butters) he heard him wail one last thing: "PLEASE I'LL GIVE YOU MONEY!"

Kyle did not look back.

He was done, and that last comment had completely cemented it.

* * *

Kyle managed to remain blissfully unaware of Cartman's plight for the remainder of the evening. He ate matzos and latkes with his family, and they sang songs and read from the Torrah. It was all getting rather tedious and he was beginning to wish that Passover would just pass over already. Getting out of school was great and all, but he was tired of being cooped up in the house. He was ready for yet another yearly reminder that he was a Jew to be over and done with, and he really, really wanted pizza.

It wasn't until he was settled in bed that thoughts of Cartman slowly seeped into his brain, and strangely, the little nagging thoughts were almost like guilt.  
Outside, the late snow piled onto his windowsill like a fashionably late guest. It had been almost warm in the warm leading up to Passover, but for some reason, on the first day, the biting chill had returned to the Colorado air, and it had finally lead to snow.  
For hours, he laid in bed. The snow was crisp and white and caked upon his window, just as the thoughts of the boy in the bunny costume caked around the outskirts of his mind.

Cartman was an asshole; that much was certain. You had to numb yourself to his stupider antics just to sleep at night sometimes.  
But something in the way he had cried out had left a disturbing impression on him. It had sounded heartfelt, or at least as heartfelt as Eric Cartman got. It had almost sounded wretched. As even his last ignorant words echoed in his head, he could hear the wretched cry in each syllable, as though he really truly thought Kyle was leaving him to die by leaving him in the park.

There was no such thing as a Jewpacabra. But Cartman had occasionally been stupid enough to accidentally fall for his own lies in the past, and as the snow and the guilt slowly built themselves up, Kyle wondered if he had made a mistake.

The week of Passover serves as a reminder of the suffering of the Hebrews during the Exodus, but it also puts an emphasis on personal responsibility.  
Maybe it was just because he had been having the concept drilled into him for the past couple of days, but despite all that Cartman had done in the past few days that had somehow caused him to wind up chained in a bunny costume in the park, Kyle felt strangely responsible.

His sleep was unfulfilling and restless. Many times he awoke throughout the night, and finally, when he rolled over and realized it was after three in the morning, the little guilty nagging in his mind finally struck him across the face with the realization that he was cold.  
Underneath his warm blankets, inside his warm room with the vent slowly breathing warm air up above, he had shivered.  
He could only imagine how Cartman must feel if he really was still out there while he laid warm and secure in his bed.  
The snow was thick on his windowsill.  
Kyle could not in good conscience leave the thought of him outside with it.

Feeling guilty did not allow him the grace of not also feeling angry. He grabbed his coat and pulled it on with a groggy noise of agitation, and he stomped the entire way down the stairs, flicking on lights with complete disregard for whether or not his parents would be woken by his early awakening.  
In the garage, he noisily went through the boxes and chests of tools and other assorted instruments and junk until he found a pair of bolt cutters.  
They were heavy and they were cold, but they seemed to be in good condition; that is, if he even needed them.  
Odds were Cartman had given up the charade hours ago. He wouldn't still be in the park.

Before he left, he thought to make a detour to his room to grab a spare blanket, and this resulted in more stomping up the stairs and more stomping down them.  
He almost hoped that his parents would emerge from their room and demand that he stop whatever he was doing; at least then he'd have a reason to return to bed.  
But they did not, and so still dressed in his pajamas, his feet hastily crammed into winter boots, he opened the door to the cold spring evening tainted with the last breath of winter.

Instantly, he was freezing. He thought of going back upstairs to dress into something warmer, but he wanted to get this over with. He just wanted to assure himself that Cartman was not still in the park freezing to death, and that way his guilty conscious would shut up and he could finally get some sleep.

The walk from his doorstep to the park was almost instantaneous; Kyle trekked his way through the bitter wind with a single-minded anger to keep him warm, thinking of all the things he would say to Cartman the next time he saw him and whether or not he should bother telling him he had cared enough to make sure he had not been freezing to death. On one hand he wanted credit for it; for another, in the highly likely event that he would find nothing in the park, he didn't want Cartman to think he had "won" somehow by "tricking" Kyle into seeking him out, only for his midnight quest to be in vain.

Discovering Cartman the second time that day was the same as it had been that afternoon. Scanning the park, the shivering form of a boy in a bunny costume escaped his gaze at first; it was almost ethereal, it couldn't possibly be there. But then his eyes settled on the sight again, and while he had spent the entire evening convincing himself that Cartman had, some way or another, gotten away, and he should have felt vindicated, he instead felt furious.  
He may have felt relief that he HAD come, or at least, he realized that had he not, Cartman would have remained in the park until morning, frozen stiff and possibly very sick. Maybe he was glad that somehow, guilt had overruled his disdain for his fat friend, and he had come in time.  
Once again, this did not stop him from feeling pissed off.

As pitiful as the sight was, (and the sound; dead asleep, Cartman was crying pathetically from the demons plaguing him in some ill-wrought dream) Kyle couldn't help but simply stand still and glare at him.  
Kyle never knew what was going on with Cartman's head. Sometimes, he tried to understand. Usually, he just gave up.  
Whatever completely fucked up steps had lead to Cartman cowering on the ground as he was right now, Kyle decided that he didn't want to know.

Carelessly tossing the blanket onto the sleeping boy, he cut the chains binding him and threw the bolt cutters to the ground. He figured he could retrieve them later, and if by some stroke of bad luck they wound up not being there in the morning, he figured his father wouldn't miss them; he couldn't remember the last time he had seen them actually being utilized for their intended purpose.

Cartman was as fat as ever, only this time he was complete deadweight, and apparently so completely out of it that Kyle could not wake him. Through sheer force of will alone he pulled him to his feet, and Cartman seemed just barely conscious enough to maintain balance, albeit it with a great deal of his weight resting on Kyle. He gripped the blanket around his body for dear life, and as Kyle wrapped his arms around him to steady him, he felt the shudders transfer through him like a conduit of electricity.  
Jesus; he was frozen.

Before they left, Kyle took one last glance at the basket of eggs, toppled over and littering the ground, and he took another look at the boy in the bunny costume.  
An odd smell assaulted his nostrils, and he realized that some of the reddish brownish stuff had smeared onto his jacket when he had lifted Cartman. He wiped some of it off and then brought his fingers closer to his face to catch a whiff of it, and his face twisted with disgust.

Cartman was covered in blood.  
Now he REALLY didn't want to know what the hell was going on.

As irrational as it was, Kyle was again furious at Cartman, and he used that anger to slowly, painstakingly make the trek from the park to the Cartman residence. Like following a rope trail out of a cave, he used it to pull himself and his sleepwalking companion out of the darkness and onto familiar streets. Every now and then Cartman would stumble and a pitiful whimper would wretch from his throat like tortured animal, and as his body grew heavier and heavier from fatigue, it became harder and harder to walk with him. Kyle grit his teeth and gripped onto his anger, willing himself to pull through with his charge in tow.

Despite supporting nearly all of his friend's grossly overweight body for the final stretch, Kyle managed to reach his home as though in something like a dream. Fingers frozen stiff from the merciless gnawing of icy teeth, he managed to shove the key into the keyhole and kick the door open. The house was warmer inside than out, but only just barely.  
There had been no car in the driveway, and it did not appear that anyone was home. Kyle knew that Liane occasionally worked night shifts, and he begrudgingly acknowledged to himself that Cartman's mother would likely not be home for hours.

Pinching and punching the life back into him, Kyle managed to bring Cartman around to just enough consciousness to climb the stairs, once again while resting most of his weight on the Jew nearly half his size. They were both out of breath by the time they reached the top, and nearly ready to collapse with exhaustion, Kyle managed to lead them into Cartman's bedroom, and with the few last bursts of energy he had, he managed to throw him onto his bed.  
Dead to the world, Cartman laid spread upon the sheets, helpless, like an infant child fresh from birth.  
Kyle had just enough strength left to pull his shoes off, and then throw his blanket over his body, covering most of it.

Then, he dragged himself to a corner and fell against the wall, collapsing in a heap to the floor.  
On the bed, the boy in the bunny costume solidly returned to a deep, troubled sleep, his face still disfigured from the knowledge of some unseen agony.  
On the floor, the Jew closed his eyes and panted, still maintaining a rigid grip on the anger that had been his keystone throughout the night.

Despite his exhaustion, Kyle climbed to his feet. Aching from the cold and sore from nearly having to carry Cartman nearly a mile through piercing wind, he slowly managed to navigate the house. He flipped on the thermostat in the hall, and then made a stop in the bathroom to wash his hands of dried, crusted blood mixed with dirt and grass.  
At one point, a feather fell from his jacket, and once again, he reminded himself that he was probably better off just not knowing.

He took a moment to check in on Cartman, who only proved to still be among the living by the vicious shivers still shaking his body. Then, steadily making his way downstairs, he retrieved a chair from the kitchen table.  
The microwave on the counter read just past half four in the morning.  
His heavy eyes drifted to the phone on the wall, beside which a hanging note of hand-written phone numbers was stuck.  
More than likely, Liane's number would be somewhere on that list.  
But if he recalled correctly, Liane returned from her night job around 6 in the morning. It would only be an hour or two.

Void of strength, he somehow managed to pull the chair up the stairs and into the bedroom. Cartman continued to shiver relentlessly underneath the covers, making enough pitiful squeaks and cries that Kyle wound up hunting in his closet for a second blanket just to hopefully shut him up.  
He threw the comforter over him, and finally, for the first time that night, Kyle had a reprieve from his whimpering.  
Cartman's face still twisted in a grimace, his last coherent moan was, "No, I don't want to die...save me..." and then silence.  
For the first time that night, Kyle was grateful he'd had the foresight to bring the chair. It was obvious he couldn't leave Cartman alone in the state he was in.

It was stupid. It was an unfounded, unwarranted sense of responsibility that made Kyle incapable of leaving him there alone.  
Whether or not it was fact, he felt responsible for Cartman's current state. He couldn't leave until he was certain that he had righted all that he had wronged.

Kyle settled into the chair with the same sort of dead tiredness Cartman had collapsed onto the bed with. With no blanket to warm him he wrapped his arms around himself to stave off the cold. His teeth chattered and his spine shivered, but the whirring vent slowly, diligently poured heat into the room, and gradually, exhaustion got the better of him. Though he intended to spend the next hour or so alert and waiting to ensure that his fat, racist asshole of a friend wasn't going to keel over and die, he allowed his heavy eyelids to slowly fall, and sleep enveloped him like the surrounding shroud of darkness.

He slept for what felt like a very long time. The sleep was dead and cold and utterly consuming, the sleep of the exhausted, and so it was a wonder that the timid buzzing managed to cut through his lethargy enough to wake him.  
Slowly, painfully, he opened his eyes. Across the room, on the nightstand, was Cartman's phone.  
On some level, Kyle realized that he had probably left it there earlier that day; it explained why he had been unable to contact anyone about his plight in the park.  
On another level, Kyle wondered why it was ringing. There wasn't even a hint of sun out yet, and no sane person would be calling anyone at this time of night, let alone Cartman.

Neither of these thoughts really fully came to the surface of his barely conscious mind. Rising from his stupor like a drunk, he managed to stumble his way across the room and grab the phone, steadying himself on the nightstand as he squinted and tried to focus enough to read the name flashing on the screen.  
Stan.

Dumbly, Kyle stared at the phone.  
In the corner, tiny little digits read: "5:12."  
He had been asleep for not quite half an hour.  
Stan's name continued to blatantly occupy the screen, and bright buttons implored him to either accept or deny the call.  
Struggling to get his sleepy fingers to work right, Kyle hit "Accept."

The phone was silent for a moment, and Kyle somehow managed to lead the phone to his ear. On the other line, someone said "Hello? Hey, dude, are you there?"  
It was Stan.  
"Hey dude," said Kyle listlessly. There was a brief silence on the other end again, and then Stan said incredulously:  
"Kyle? Is that you?"  
"Yeah, dude. What's up?"  
"What's up? Dude, where are you? Why are you on Cartman's phone?"  
Kyle was irritated. It was five in the morning. Even Stan didn't usually try to bother him that early, and even over the phone, he sounded frantic. It was way too early in the morning for Stan to be frantic. "I'm at Cartman's. Long story."  
"Kyle, your mom has been calling everyone in town for like the past hour. She says she heard weird noises and woke up and you were gone. She thought you were kidnapped or something."  
Kyle let loose a dry, barking laugh. "Really?" There was just enough space on Cartman's bed for him to take a few inches of it to sit. Ordinarily he may have gone out of his way to avoid also touching him, but in his current state, he simply didn't care.  
"Yeah, she woke my parents up and came straight to me because they figured I'd know where you are. We've all been trying to call you."  
"I left my phone at home. I forgot to grab it; I went out in pajamas."

"In this weather?" As he imagined Stan was probably doing a few blocks away, Kyle glanced out the window. The snow had not let up. "Dude, why the hell are you getting up at three in the morning to go visit Cartman?" He said this in a tone of voice that implied that Kyle had completely lost his mind. Kyle wondered if that wasn't the case.  
"Look, I don't know what the story was. I don't really want to know. All I know is that earlier today, Cartman was chained up in the park in a bunny costume, and when I first saw him earlier I left him there because he was being an asshole."

Kyle allowed a few seconds to pass for Stan to reply, but his friend only said, "Huh?" in the sort of way that you might reply to someone presenting you with an impossible math problem.  
"I know; that's why I said I just didn't want to even know." Behind him, Cartman stirred uneasily and made another, high pitched whine. A shiver coursed down his spine again, so violent that even Kyle felt it. Underneath three sets of blankets, he still appeared cold. "But I felt really guilty for leaving him and I had to go see if he was still there. I did, and he was, so I brought him home. His mother doesn't get home for like another hour so I was just staying with him to make sure he didn't, like, die from hypothermia or something."  
"You need to call your mom," Stan replied immediately. "If you don't she's going to call the police and have them start sending out search parties and shit."  
Kyle groaned, "Dude, I don't want to talk to my mother right now. I just really don't."

"Well, Jesus Christ dude, you've got to do something. Everyone's all freaking out and calling everyone in town looking for you. That's why I called Cartman."

Kyle glanced over his shoulder. Cartman's shivering had intensified again. With his free hand, he touched the side of his face, and was surprised to learn two things: his cheeks were still cold, as though he had only just come inside, and they were also wet.  
Silently, still trapped in the abyss of whatever nightmare he had fallen into, he was crying.  
"Kyle?"  
"I can't leave, dude," he said to Stan. "At least not until his mom gets back." Sighing in defeat, he wiped his hand off on the comforter and pushed himself to his feet. He made his way to the closet to hunt for another blanket. "Listen, Stan, I have a favor to ask..."  
"Yeah?"  
"Are you with your parents? Like, do they know you've contacted me?"  
"No, they're all calling their friends. I'm alone. They told me to come get them if I got hold of you."  
"Can I ask you to...well, maybe just tell a little white lie?"  
"You mean, tell them I haven't gotten hold of you."  
"Yeah."  
"Dude, really? Just for Cartman? You're in enough trouble as it is."  
"Please, Stan? Just for another hour." There was no spare blanket in the closet, and so Kyle began to make his way through the rest of the house. If it came to it, he would grab something off of his mother's bed, but frankly he didn't want to touch a blanket belonging to Liane Cartman if he could help it.

"If you're really sure," Stan began, and Kyle interrupted him.  
"I'm sure."  
"Then I haven't heard from you." He sounded distinctly uncomfortable making this promise, but he made it, nonetheless. "Just swear to me that you'll go home soon."  
"I promise." A hallway closet revealed to be a secret stash of bed sheets, pillow cases and unused, mismatched comforters, and Kyle took a stack of the latter and heaped them under his arm. "I'm gonna go dude."  
"Alright. See you tomorrow, if your mom doesn't kill you."  
"Or ground me until Yom Kippur," Kyle mumbled as he tapped the "End" button on the phone.

When he returned, Cartman had not moved, and again, the only tell-tale sign that he was alive was the slow, agonized rising and falling of his chest, and the occasional, full-body shiver that electrified his body.

Kyle threw as many of the blankets over top of him as he could without suffocating the guy, and then he retired to his chair to take up his sentry duty once more, and this time, he did not slip away into dead sleep. Cartman had begun to whimper again, and in the dead of night, snow drifted against the windowpane and climbing high onto the glass like crawling moss, Kyle thought he heard him pleadingly say his name.

He was half asleep though, so he couldn't be sure.

* * *

As expected, Kyle was grounded the second he walked through the door. Despite the clearly zombified state her son was in, Sheila Broflovski cut no corners in hashing out a very thorough lecture about being worried sick and causing half the town to panic and the example he was setting for Ike how could he be so irresponsible at his age?  
Kyle took it stoically until she was blue in the face, and then he simply asked if he could go to bed.  
Afterward, he realized that it was probably this request that caused him not to get any sleep at all.

It was late morning by the time he finally escaped her clutches, and it was his father that allowed him a reprieve from his torment by sending him on an errand. Something or other had convinced Gerald that Kyle had had a very good reason for disappearing so late at night, and so when Sheila was distracted he handed his son a list of some things needed from the local grocery. Kyle didn't need to be told twice, and he left as soon as he could.

Spring was reasserting itself with a vengeance that morning, and almost all of the late snow that had fallen the night before had melted by the time the Easter Egg hunt was running amok in the park. Kyle happened to pass by on his way to the market, in time to catch a certain fat friend of his stealing the spotlight, as usual.  
Numb from a lack of sleep, he listened to Cartman's heartfelt speech about converting to Judaism without even a trace of vexation. And when Cartman assured him that he was being honest and true, he agreed with him, and when he wished him a Happy Passover, he returned the sentiment.

Kyle figured that Liane had not told her son about his involvement in his getting safely to bed last night. And that was all for the better; Kyle didn't really want him to know.

But much later that night, after the matzos and the songs and the tiresome traditions that Kyle was even more exasperated with than usual, Kyle had no sooner allowed his weary head to rest upon his pillow with sheer gratitude when he was interrupted by the sound of his phone ringing.  
It declared, "_She's a maniac; MANIAC on the floor."_

And Kyle groaned. His eyes were plastered closed; his head was full of lead. He couldn't possibly lift himself from the pillow.

"_And she's dancin' like she's never danced before!" _the phone insisted. Still, Kyle's head did not budge.

Twice more the phone alerted him of the maniac on the dance floor, and then it fell silent. Only seconds later, it buzzed again, and alerted him that he had received a text message.

Just barely able to lift his arm, he managed to slap it down upon his nightstand and grope around for his phone. Blindly he pressed the button and swiped to open the text message, and he was just barely able to open his eyes enough to read the tiny black letters on the screen.

_Thank you._

Kyle had just enough strength to tap two letters in response: _NP _and then send the message. Then, his phone still in his hand, he rolled over and prompted passed out as a late winter wind whistled against the glass.


End file.
